MEMRI TV has released translated highlights of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent address to the PLO Central Council, as well as the highlights transcript. And boy, are there some real doozies in it! Watch for yourself, or skip below the video where I fisk the worst parts.

Mahmoud Abbas: “This is a watershed moment. This is a dangerous moment. Our entire future is on the line. If Jerusalem is gone, what will you do next? Establish a state with Abu Dis as its capital? This is what they are offering us now. Abu Dis and whatever… It’s over. We are here, and we shall stay here. We shall not repeat the mistakes of the past. We shall not repeat the mistakes of 1948 and 1967.

To which mistakes of the past is he referring? Their constant rejection of every peace proposal put forward? If so, they are repeating the exact mistakes of the past.

We shall stay here regardless of the occupation and the settlements. We shall not leave this country. This is our country. This has been our land since the days of the Canaanites. By the way, our Canaanite forefathers… The Torah says… and I do not want to go into history or geography… From the days of the Canaanites and to this day, [our forefathers] have not left this land. They were here before our patriarch Abraham. We were. Since before our patriarch Abraham…”

Here Abbas is repeating the historical negationism we heard in his recent speech at the emergency meeting of the OIC. But note the contradiction. He is claiming they were here “before our patriarch Abraham.” This is not possible. A patriarch is by definition the first, the father of the people as it were. Does Abbas even listen to himself speaking?

By the way, there is another contradiction. As I explained in the past, if the palestinians were around before Abraham

This is a reference to the Philistines, since the only Biblical reference Abbas could be talking about is the text that Abraham dwelt “many days in the land of the Philistines.” (Genesis 21: 34).

Abbas clearly has a hard time with history. And logic.

“The late Egyptian intellectual Abdel-Wahab El-Messiri was among the most important people who talked about the Zionist movement and Judaism. His encyclopedias and volumes are well known throughout the Arab world. He describes that entity as follows: ‘The functional nature of Israel means that it was evoked by colonialism in order to fulfill a specific function, and thus it constitutes a colonialist enterprise that has nothing to do with Judaism.'”

“When Herzl arrived in Palestine, he saw people, human beings, citizens. So he said: ‘We should erase the Palestinians from Palestine, so that it will become a land without a people for a people without a land. ‘This is the origin of the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land.” This is the origin of the slogan coined by Herzl.

This is a complete lie. Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland (old-new land) sets forward a utopian vision that included a multipluralistic democracy in which Arabs and Jews had equal rights. In fact

One of the main characters in Altneuland is a Haifa engineer, Reshid Bey, who is one of the leaders of the “New Society”. He is very grateful to his Jewish neighbors for improving the economic condition of Israel and sees no cause for conflict. All non-Jews have equal rights, and an attempt by a fanatical rabbi to disenfranchise the non-Jewish citizens of their rights fails in the election which is the center of the main political plot of the novel

“When they occupied 78% of Palestine, they were only 650,000 Jews. What were they to do? They said: We need Jews. But the Jews refused to come. Ben-Gurion did not want to bring the Jews of the East.

[…]

“He would say: ‘I hate them. They look like Arabs. They look like Arabs, and I don’t want them. It will take three or four generations for anything to come of them. I don’t want them.’ But when he saw how vast the [newly occupied] land was, he was forced to bring in Jews.

Our Zionist policy must now pay special attention to the Jewish population groups in the Arab countries. If there are diasporas that it is our obligation to eliminate with the greatest possible urgency by bringing those Jews to the homeland, it is the Arab diasporas: Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, as well as the Jews of Persia and Turkey. What European Jewry is now experiencing obliges us to be especially anxious about the fate of the diasporas in the Middle East. Those Jewish groups are the hostages of Zionism… Our first move with a view toward coming events is immigration. But the paths of immigration from Europe are desolate now. The [doors] are shut tight, and there are very few countries that have a land link to the Land of Israel – the neighboring countries. All these considerations are cause for anxiety and for special activity to move the Jews in the Arab countries to the land of Israel speedily. It is a mark of great failure by Zionism that we have not yet eliminated the Yemen exile [diaspora].If we do not eliminate the Iraq exile by Zionist means, there is a danger that it will be eliminated by Hitlerite means

Abbas continues:

The Arab Jews did not want to come either – not from Iraq and not from Yemen. From Yemen, in 1949, TWA airplanes… TWA was owned by… By Somalia? By whom? TWA took 50,000 Jews from Yemen to Israel. It was called Operation Magic Carpet. That was its code name. But these 50,000 were not enough, and they turned to Iraq. In Iraq, there was a huge reservoir of Jews, a wealth of Jews. So they reached an agreement with Nuri Al-Said, Allah’s mercy upon him, and with Tawfiq Al-Suwaidi, Allah’s mercy upon him too… They reached an agreement that they would strip the Jews of their nationality, and force them to leave. Thus, 150,000 Iraqi Jews were driven out and sent to Israel. They did not make do with this. They gathered the Jews from all the Arab countries – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon – and did not leave anyone behind. They transferred them all to Israel.”

This is another blatant lie, reminiscent of Abbas’ dissertation claim that the Zionists were in cahoots with the Nazis.

“The Oslo Accords, of course… Now, I say that Oslo… Israel… There is no Oslo anymore. Israel has brought the Oslo Accords to an end. So among the resolutions that we need to take is the issue of the Oslo Accords. Where are we going from here?

As I mentioned previously, it is absurd to on one hand not recognize any Jewish right to live in this land, and then claim it is us who destroyed Oslo. Clearly, Abbas and his people never really signed on to Oslo to begin with – which can also explained their rejections of the peace offers we out forward.

“I don’t want to see [Trump] on Twitter again, saying: We won’t give the Palestinians any money because they reject negotiations. To hell with you! When have we ever rejected negotiations?

“I am not ashamed to repeat it a hundred – no, a thousand – times: I support only peaceful popular resistance, of the kind with which we confronted the occupation in the past month or so, since the Trump initiative was launched. Believe me, peaceful popular resistance is stronger and more effective than any other kind.

[…]

“We have signed 83 protocols with 83 countries to fight terrorism, and we are all for fighting terrorism. But along comes the ‘great’ Congress and says that the PLO is terrorist, and that it wants to shut down the PLO offices. They issued 27 resolutions that we are terrorists. To hell with you! We are fighting terrorism together.

For a start, the “resistance” his people used the past month or so was anything but peaceful. I guess stones and Molotov cocktails do not count as violence in his eyes (nor the various rockets from Gaza). This, plus his claim that he fights terrorism, is patently absurb, and he even contradicts it himself later on in his speech, when he says:

The Americans are always telling us that we must stop paying salaries to the families of the martyrs and the prisoners. We categorically reject this demand. Under no circumstances will we allow the families of the martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners to be harmed. These are our children, our families. We are proud of them, and we will pay them before we pay the living.

Paying the families of terrorists is a pretty strong show of support of terrorism, one would think.

“We are proud that whenever people talk about ISIS, they say that there are 5,000 members from this nationality, 2,000 from that nationality, and 3,000 from a third one, but they cannot find even five Palestinian ISIS members.

An Aussie immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave is founder and managing editor of Israellycool, one of the world's most popular pro-Israel blogs (and the one you are currently reading)
He is a happy family man, and a lover of steak, Australian sports and girlie drinks